If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
BILL BRYSONIf you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
BILL BRYSONThere is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
BILL BRYSONIndeed, if your pillow is six years old–which is apparently about the average age for a pillow–it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.
BILL BRYSONYou don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
BILL BRYSONOn the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,
BILL BRYSONThe first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
BILL BRYSONMost of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSONThe food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
BILL BRYSONThis was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.
BILL BRYSONWe may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
BILL BRYSONMy favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.
BILL BRYSONAmerica is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSONI wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
BILL BRYSONAnd a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
BILL BRYSONWe forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
BILL BRYSONYou may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy.
BILL BRYSON